Had it not been for Corona I might never have 'met' Amitée. I should mention that our meeting was online, and that Amitée is her 'trade name', not her given name. Amitée, deriving like Amity from French Amitié (friendship), certainly sits well with her infectious warmth and generous character. We met to discuss a mysteriously far-reaching venture which had immediately caught my imagination. However, it was only when after our meeting I had begun to compare her various business projects (Amitée calls them 'experiments') that I sensed something of the thinking that linked them.
I decided to contact her after a City friend mentioned a cross-departmental online encounter with Amitée hosted by his management consultancy office. The unlikely title of the meeting was Personal Poultry. Was this a paltry gimmick? In what became a webinar, or 'egginar' as my whimsical friend dubbed the teaching phase (consisting of 10 x 10-minute sessions), office staff from the first-year intake through to partners were invited to learn about organic chicken raising and how to run their 'own farm' straight from their laptops. The 'egginar' had been funded by the partners to counter the pervasive, punishing drudgery of zoom meetings which, during Corona, all office staff were forced to endure. If willing, participants could later assume responsibility for a brood of hens. This involved remote, real-world, webcam-supported control of the birds' feeding, security, health and hygiene, and due attention was rewarded with regular deliveries of pasture-range eggs to the participants' doorstep.
